Sunday, January 13, 2013

So . . . What Have We Been Up To?

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I completely forgot where I left off. I've been wanting to blog. Thought about blogging. Felt too
overwhelmed to start up again. Too
much to cover. Not enough
time. Barely any energy. Kind of the story of my life, really.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to keep up with Red Hill
– for better or for worse.

When we left off in my last post, we had stripped the old aluminum siding off our poor old 1909 Craftsman. We ended up deciding on the James Hardie siding. We just knew we didn't want to face regular painting. And who knows what horrors future homeowners might visit on a 1909 house with the original wood siding. Stucco? Seriously, I would want to wish seriously bad karma upon anyone who might put stucco on our house. I crossed my fingers and hoped that fiber-cement siding was not a mortal sin.

After the old siding came down, the house got wrapped -

Just as a special treat for the neighbors, a porta-potty. Nothing says "Welcome to the Neighborhood" like a porta-potty.

And the Kitten gives the laundry duct work a good review.

This part won't get new siding. Apparently it would be too complicated. This will only get a paint job. Once it's done, we can barely tell the difference.

Then the painting starts -

Actually, before the painting started, we had to choose the paint colors. The siding itself came in a limited number of pre-painted colors. The trick was to choose the trim color that would go with the green siding that we'd selected and also with the red framing of the windows. See that yellow? How indubitablyyellow it is? I thougt it was supposed to be something called Honeydew, not outright "yellow." I'm not a big fan of yellow. How I ended up selecting "yellow" as one of the colors for my house is a mystery that will always haunt me. The greatest mystery might be how I have had ten years now to select house colors and then waited until the last minute to make a decision - under quite a lot of pressure. Men with paint brushes were ready to paint. My big, bad show was just about to close but it wasn't closed yet so I didn't have time to run around collecting paint chips and researching historic Craftsman colors (though Zeus only knows that I've been saving magazine articles about exterior Craftsman colors for years.)

Anyway, K gathered up some paint chips; we lined them up in yard in sunlight and we made our choice - Honeydew. Then, once the yellow was applied to the trim we were "Whoa! That's not what we thought we were getting." It was so sunny. Sunny is definitely not something that I want to say about myself. Sunny is not who I am. Sunny is not who we are. I crossed my fingers and hoped that once the the second color went on, the sunny quality of the yellow would be softened.

Or, at worst, we could just wait out the paint until the trim needed painting again.

Even the contractor later expressed his doubts about the yellowness of the yellow.

Then the new siding went up. I don't remember the name of the green - maybe it was Mountain Sage from James Hardie?

And as we hoped, it all came together -

and the yellow seemed to work - or so I, perhaps delusionally, believe.

There was still a lot to do before the porta-potty would leave.

Next up - horrible, dangerous, not-to-code steps leading up to the porch.

Thank Zeus, the yellow definitely worked out! Since you mentioned that you’re not the type to go sunny, I automatically thought that that yellow was certainly not for you. You’re so lucky that the green you chose was the perfect balance for that yellow. Great job on your choice of color for your siding!

Green siding, yellow trim, and red window frames – one would think that it's going to look like a mess but looking at the pictures, I do agree that it worked out well. Maybe as time goes on and a bit of the brightness fades, you can rest assured that it's not just delusional thinking. -Nelson@Royal Roofing and Siding